Unhooked, again and again …

People are going to begin to get the idea that I’m obsessed with Laura Sessions Stepp. I’m not, I swear. It’s just that damn woman keeps coming up everywhere i go. Yesterday, she snuck up on me in a conversation I was having in the computer lab up at school. A classmate is writing her thesis on social norms on college campuses, and she was raving about a great interview she’d had with a writer from the washington post about college students and sex. “Oh, that’s great,” I said. “Who was it?”

Why, Laura Sessions Stepp, of course.

“She wrote this really interesting book called ‘Unhooked,'” my classmate said. “Have you heard of it?”

“Yes,” I replied, then quickly got re-engrossed in the excel spreadsheet on my computer. I had neither the inclination nor the heart to get into a debate about Unhooked with this well-meaning classmate who was basking in her post-Stepp-interview glow. But, alas, the conversation continued without me. Others had joined in, and now the classmate was detailing her interview, espousing the Unhooked party line with much zeal.

“She interviewed all these college women about their hookups and the sex they were having, and she found it was making all of them really, really unhappy,” the classmate was explaining to the computer lab, as she proceeded to go on about how maybe there should be more efforts on college campuses to tell girls they don’t have to have sex because maybe “hooking up” really does make young women unhappy.

Well of course it does! Sex makes a lot of people — women and men! — unhappy. Relationships in general make people unhappy. People get confused and hurt and rejected all the time; it’s a big mess all around and, dear god, especially in college. It’s also great fun, too. Which is why people keep having relationships and having sex, even if they do get hurt sometimes. It seems silly to me to take the premise that sometimes women get hurt in sexual relationships to the extension that they should therefore forego sexual relationships.

But what’s even stranger about the conclusions drawn by Step and the book and people advocating the book — and I should point out now that I haven’t actually read the book, so fault me for that if you will, but I feel like I’ve read and hear endlessly about the book — is that they point to what seems like the obvious and exact opposite of the right solutions.

The women interviewed in the book lament that “hooking up” isn’t leading to a relationship. They are hurt because they hooked up with someone and that person never called. They are hurt because they hooked up with someone then the person didn’t fall in love with them. They are hurt because they had a “friends with benefits” situation that contained no benefits they saw worthwhile. So Stepp and the advocates of this book will point to how sadly over-sexed our culture has become and how the evil feminists made women think they could just have sex like this and then be okay but they are not okay so what we need is less sex and less feminism.

What seems like the obvious conclusion to me (and a lot of other people who have blogged about this; I know I’m just regurgitating what’s been said time and again and better by others, but allow me my own unhooked-rant-time, okay?) about all this is that what it really means is we need more feminism and more sex. Or at least more openness about sex.

Because all the problems women in this book are having when it comes to sex come not from having sex per se, but from having sex for the wrong reasons. They are having sex when the don’t want to with people the don’t want to because they feel like it’s what they should be doing, or they are having sex with the expectations that it will land them a boyfriend or a relationship or prestige or love. They are using sex in order to try and get some sort of other benefit from it, and then getting upset when that other benefit doesn’t materialize.

It seems like what we should really be teaching young women, then, is not ‘you should not have sex because it will make you miserable,’ but ‘you should not have sex independent of your own wants and desires.’ (if it was 1995, I would type the word ‘duh!” after that sentence. Maybe even ‘no doy’). You should not have sex as a means to an end. You should have sex because you want to have sex. And if you do not want to, that’s okay. And if you do want to, that’s okay too.

Because another issue in this book seems to be guilt. From the clips and quotes I’ve read, a lot of these women seem to be expressing a lot of guilt for having casual sex, or a lot of shame from outside parties, which leads them to think they need to be in a relationship to have sex. This is another unfortunate byproduct of a culture that is not open about sex, and exactly the sort of thing we should be discouraging. Young women would probably be a lot more capable of enjoying sex for its own merits (and on their own terms) if they didn’t feel guilt and shame — from the outside world, and internalized from the messages they get all around them. The reason young women Stepp interviewed feel guilty and miserable about “hooking up” is because they and the world around them have not come to terms with female sexuality outside of using it to entice love or marriage or fraternity pins or whatever.

Stepp’s theory that “hooking up” in college and high school is entirely destructive is questionable in its own right, but even if we give this the benefit of the doubt and say that it is destructive — that it really is making hoards of women unhappy — then it seems the answer should be to figure out why it is making them unhappy and how we can change this, not just tell them to stop doing it.

see, yeah, i don’t think her thesis is based on this stuff … altogether, her thesis sounds really cool, actually …. she just happened to interview Stepp to get an “expert opinion” on things, which is an unfortunate choice of expert opinions, but …